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Kerry Today: After accusing Bush of a "pattern of deception" and " deliberately misleading" the country into war Kerry said this,

"We remember the pieces of evidence, like aluminum tubes and Niger yellow cake uranium, that were laid out before us, All designed, all purposefully used to shift the focus ... from the real enemy, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden , to an enemy that they aggrandized and fictionalized."

"My fellow Americans, you don't make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact,"

Kerry in 2002 while he was privy to the same intelligence as the White House:

"With respect to Saddam Hussein and the threat he presents, we must ask ourselves a simple question: Why? Why is Saddam Hussein pursuing weapons that most nations have agreed to limit or give up? Why is Saddam Hussein guilty of breaking his own cease-fire agreement with the international community? Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don't even try, and responsible nations that have them attempt to limit their potential for disaster? Why did Saddam Hussein threaten and provoke? Why does he develop missiles that exceed allowable limits? Why did Saddam Hussein lie and deceive the inspection teams previously? Why did Saddam Hussein not account for all of the weapons of mass destruction which UNSCOM identified? Why is he seeking to develop unmanned airborne vehicles for delivery of biological agents?

Does he do all of these things because he wants to live by international standards of behavior? Because he respects international law? Because he is a nice guy underneath it all and the world should trust him?

It would be naive to the point of grave danger not to believe that, left to his own devices, Saddam Hussein will provoke, misjudge, or stumble into a future, more dangerous confrontation with the civilized world. He has as much as promised it. He has already created a stunning track record of miscalculation. He miscalculated an 8-year war with Iran. He miscalculated the invasion of Kuwait. He miscalculated America's responses to it. He miscalculated the result of setting oil rigs on fire. He miscalculated the impact of sending Scuds into Israel. He miscalculated his own military might. He miscalculated the Arab world's response to his plight. He miscalculated in attempting an assassination of a former President of the United States. And he is miscalculating now America's judgments about his miscalculations.

All those miscalculations are compounded by the rest of history. A brutal, oppressive dictator, guilty of personally murdering and condoning murder and torture, grotesque violence against women, execution of political opponents, a war criminal who used chemical weapons against another nation and, of course, as we know, against his own people, the Kurds. He has diverted funds from the Oil-for-Food program, intended by the international community to go to his own people. He has supported and harbored terrorist groups, particularly radical Palestinian groups such as Abu Nidal, and he has given money to families of suicide murderers in Israel.

I mention these not because they are a cause to go to war in and of themselves, as the President previously suggested, but because they tell a lot about the threat of the weapons of mass destruction and the nature of this man. We should not go to war because these things are in his past, but we should be prepared to go to war because of what they tell us about the future. It is the total of all of these acts that provided the foundation for the world's determination in 1991 at the end of the gulf war that Saddam Hussein must: unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless underinternational supervision of his chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems... [and] unconditionally agree not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons or nuclear weapon-usable material.

Saddam Hussein signed that agreement. Saddam Hussein is in office today because of that agreement. It is the only reason he survived in 1991. In 1991, the world collectively made a judgment that this man should not have weapons of mass destruction. And we are here today in the year 2002 with an uninspected 4-year interval during which time we know through intelligence he not only has kept them, but he continues to grow them.

I believe the record of Saddam Hussein's ruthless, reckless breach of international values and standards of behavior which is at the core of the cease-fire agreement, with no reach, no stretch, is cause enough for the world community to hold him accountable by use of force, if necessary. The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons.

He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation.

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force-if necessary-to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."

What a bunch of horse shit. John Kerry is consistently dishonest, hypocritical, unprincipled and opportunistic. From what I have seen I believe that John Kerry will say absolutely anything to get re-elected. I thought he was alright at first, but this kind of ridiculousness is beyond belief.

--------------------1. "After an hour I wasn't feeling anything so I decided to take another..."
2. "We were feeling pretty good so we decided to smoke a few bowls..."
3. "I had to be real quiet because my parents were asleep upstairs..."

Quote:Divided Sky:What a bunch of horse shit. John Kerry is consistently dishonest, hypocritical, unprincipled and opportunistic. From what I have seen I believe that John Kerry will say absolutely anything to get re-elected. I thought he was alright at first, but this kind of ridiculousness is beyond belief.

Got any sources for that mud slinging? Or are you just repeating the talking head spin? I'm honestly curious.

The first section is a composite of qoutes from USA Today and the AFP from this morning.

The second is Senator Kerry's adress to the United States Senate on Oct. 9th 2002.

When Kerry continues to accuse Bush of "misleading" the country into war, and delibaretely distorting the case for war, all the while he had access to the very same material and echoed every one of Bush's claims until it became unfashionable a few months back, it shows dishonesty, inconsistenty and unprincipled character. Kerry calls Bush a liar when from his own knowledge he knows it isn't true, and contradicts himself when it becomes politically adventageous.

--------------------1. "After an hour I wasn't feeling anything so I decided to take another..."
2. "We were feeling pretty good so we decided to smoke a few bowls..."
3. "I had to be real quiet because my parents were asleep upstairs..."

Kerry is going to have a hard time if he is elected. Somehow he will have the obligation to "be straight" with the American people by criticizing the Iraq war while attempting to win it, reaching out to "allies" who have said they will never help us even if he is president, and leading a coalition he has already dissed.
The stupid stuff he has been saying is setting himself up for failure. There is no way he will (and hopefull intends) to carry through on any of these things. From what I can conclude then, he is simply being dishonest and hypocritical, saying things he has no intention on follow through, just to get elected.

--------------------1. "After an hour I wasn't feeling anything so I decided to take another..."
2. "We were feeling pretty good so we decided to smoke a few bowls..."
3. "I had to be real quiet because my parents were asleep upstairs..."

I first saw it on TV and Kerry went off about how the war in Iraq was wrong because the Duelfer report says there were no WMDs. I was looking for a full text but could not find one. Unfortunately that juicy bit didn't make it into any of the news briefs.

--------------------1. "After an hour I wasn't feeling anything so I decided to take another..."
2. "We were feeling pretty good so we decided to smoke a few bowls..."
3. "I had to be real quiet because my parents were asleep upstairs..."

He is counting on people to disregard his past positions. John Kerry is the flavor of the month. If I made that many contradictory blunders, I would be ashamed to show my face in public. The man is weak.

Kerry voted to provide Bush the authority and some funding for military action in Iraq. It was at this point that the Bush administration still had some credibility, plus the American people were still reeling from 9/11.

Kerry then decided NOT to vote for a second bill that would have given a great deal more funding to Bush. Kerry voted against this because he didn't feel Bush should be issued such a "blank check" on the matter.

Fast-forward to now and Kerry is in a tough spot for people with poor critical thinking skills. Not everyone can appreciate the nuance of intelligent thinking, Bush most definitely capitalizes on this with his base. Like myself and many others, Kerry does not support the reasons we went to war. He does not support how the war is being ran now or the lack of planning that went into it in the first place. What he does support are our troops. He supports an appropriate, well planned and internationally backed effort to fix the enourmous problem that Bush created. I think he expressed it well in the first debate by saying that supporting the war and supporting the warriors (soldiers) are two different things. Bush and his spinsters don't want the average person to ponder that. For bush it's either you're with him, or against him. There are no shades of gray in georgie's world.

So, Bush has been very consistant in his 4 years, that's true. The problem is that he's been consistantly wrong. He lacks the intelligence and flexibility to ever admit he's wrong or to deviate from a very narrow, myopic world view. I think Kerry has proven he is capable of living in a dynamic world. The Bush administration, if not Bush himself, is aware of this disparity between the candidates and that is why from the very beginning they have been labeling Kerry as a flip-flopper, despite any real evidence to back it up. They just kept saying it over and over and their drooling fan base just opened wide as Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and others regurgitated it across the air waves and newsprint.

Indeed. And this VERY expensive war is one reason why the deficit is so large. And the government prints more money to cover it, at which point we will have runaway inflation and so on and so forth...
I think we'll be a long time paying for Bush's mistake...

Unbeliever, you make a mistake when you say John Kerry did not support the reasons given for the war. They are qouted in the original post. He espoused every rationale that he today criticized Bush for making, and his judgement was based on the same information. If he had the same information at the time, agreed with the President about everything but the degree of multinationalism in invasion, and now calls the president deceptive and misleading for saying the same things as him it shows that something is really inconsistent about his position. That is not nuance.

He can try to defer responsiblity by claiming his vote for war was only to authorize the president, but that is a weak way out. He knew what he was voting for, and he voted for the war despite it not checking out with Europe and the UN. It sounds like he is trying to weasel out of his vote with this logic.

Kerry can criticize Bush on not garnering more allies (though he is not being realistic) and he can accuse Bush of incompetence in handling post-war Iraq (which I think is a little unfair), he can do all of this without even saying how he would do it better, but to criticize the evidence and the rationale for the decision is hypocrisy.

I see it as part of Kerry's broader strategy of finding fault with everything Bush does, even if he contradicts himself, proposing to do the same thing better but not disclosing how he would do it, and then in hindsight claiming he would have succeeded at doing things Bush has not, with again very little support.

I have a problem with this because it show me that a) Kerry is willing to say anything to win, b) will not and cannot make good on his campaign promises, c) is disengenious towards his rivals and d)will likely reverse his position once elected (If he gets elected you can bet the talk about "leveling" with the American people about Iraq will stop. It would be his job to encourage Americans and win the war rather than bitch about and capitalize on failure, and he would behave exactly the same way that Bush is. Thus his criticism is unfair, and will prove to be hypocritical)

--------------------1. "After an hour I wasn't feeling anything so I decided to take another..."
2. "We were feeling pretty good so we decided to smoke a few bowls..."
3. "I had to be real quiet because my parents were asleep upstairs..."

--------------------1. "After an hour I wasn't feeling anything so I decided to take another..."
2. "We were feeling pretty good so we decided to smoke a few bowls..."
3. "I had to be real quiet because my parents were asleep upstairs..."

Quote:In that article, Kerry says:The next level of failure of leadership is in actually not doing what's necessary now to protect the troops. I disagree with Joe Lieberman on this. We should not send more American troops. That would be the worst thing. We do not want to have more Americanization. We do not want a greater sense of American occupation. We need to minimize that. And the way to do that is do everything possible, including sharing the power, to bring other countries in to take the burden.

I think, if your head is spinning from this, I might explain it to you. In this debate with Lieberman, Kerry attempted to press the importance of an international resolution to the issue, because increasing the occupational force also gives greater will to the resistance. He is suggesting a willingness to to hand over power in Iraq to the international community so that a legitimate force would be established.

He had previously mentioned Bush's failure to establish an international force earlier in the same interview.

Quote:Divided_Sky said:

He criticizes No Child Left Behind, but he voted for it.

Ok, first let me say that I don't know the record or conditions of this vote. But if you don't know the full conditions, you can't really criticize such actions yourself. Legislative bills are not written to address a single question and declare a single priority. They often contain a bundle of different enactments. These bundles are often a mix of the desires of the house and senate- bills are passed through compromise of enactments included from different camps within legislature. Sometimes enactments are attached in a rather sneaky way to completely undermine the original intent of a bill, this is a dirty political game that is often played by both sides. A vote for or against such a bill can be interpreted either way.

The same issue arrises when evaluating the spending bills that were requrest to pay for the war, which Kerry "flip flopped" on so often. The thing is, spending bills especially will have a mix of enactments, such that if you only look at one portion of the bill and consider the bill in that context then you will not be able to grasp the full impact of the bill.

Quote:Divided_Sky said:Kerry is going to have a hard time if he is elected. Somehow he will have the obligation to "be straight" with the American people by criticizing the Iraq war while attempting to win it, reaching out to "allies" who have said they will never help us even if he is president, and leading a coalition he has already dissed.
The stupid stuff he has been saying is setting himself up for failure. There is no way he will (and hopefull intends) to carry through on any of these things. From what I can conclude then, he is simply being dishonest and hypocritical, saying things he has no intention on follow through, just to get elected.

Kerry is going to have a hard time if elected because its a difficult time to rule the US. It was a difficult time while Bush is in office, he admits, and we can see the results he had. I hope Kerry can do better, but as a policy I'm not going to help re-elect any presidents who destroyed more countries than they've restored.

A lot of your disagreement stems from your belief that Kerry and Bush had the same information back then. I don't think that is the case. The evidence against Saddam presented to the President's administration was not cut'n'dry, the administration was given plenty of reason to doubt that Saddam posed an immediate thread. However, the evidence presented by the administration to the country and to the world was filtered in a premeditated manner to make Iraq seem like an immediate threat, to justify going to war. The question is only if this was a result the administration's negligence or premeditated deception. I would say its some mix of both, with some members of the adminstration being naive, others being deceptive, and others simply afraid to rock the boat.

The arms report indicates that Saddam hated the US (who doesn't these days?) and wanted to make WMDs when he had a chance. A lot of foreign countries would like to make WMDs, this in itself doesn't make them an immediate threat justifying a war. The fact is, the sanctions were working when the US forced the inspectors out of Iraq. The US could have waited as long as the sanctions were in effect and the inspectors had access to Iraq's sites on the ground. More time would have allowed the weapon's inspections to complete and provide time for a case to be made internationally for military intervention.

Kerry's always stressed the importance about international support. Its not just about sharing the burden of supplying troops- its also about having the credibility to establish a new government. That credibility does not belong to a single nation who's leader has mispresented what is known about the need for war. Thats the "global test" Bush missed, and we're paying the price.

Quote: Kerry voted to provide Bush the authority and some funding for military action in Iraq. It was at this point that the Bush administration still had some credibility, plus the American people were still reeling from 9/11.

Kerry then decided NOT to vote for a second bill that would have given a great deal more funding to Bush. Kerry voted against this because he didn't feel Bush should be issued such a "blank check" on the matter.

ROFL. So Kerry was perfectly fine with giving the President a blank check TO GO TO WAR, but when it came to spending some money, Kerry wasn't such a fan. For the record, I hate both Bush and Kerry with the utmost passion, so I really don't like defending either or targeting one alone -- but that might be the worst justification for a decision in the HISTORY of justifications for decisions. Carte Blanche to go to war but no way I'll let him spend money on that war, give me a break.

--------------------?When Alexander the Great visted the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: 'Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.' It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.?
-Henry Hazlitt in 'Economics in One Lesson'

No doubt about that Ancalagon. If Kerry wanted to lodge a "protest vote", it should have been the vote against the War itself. If he really thinks it was a diversion from the real fight, no way he should have voted for it. The vote for the war is the most important vote a Congressman can make. It is also a vote that ONLY Congress can make. Don't blame John Kerry's poor voting record on George Bush.

I am not intelligent enough to appreciate John Forbes Kerry's "nuance". I am still waiting for anyone to point out a time when Congress voted to authorize force where the United States didn't go to war. As far as I can tell, WAR has happened every single time that Congress has voted to authorize force. Not to much "nuance" in that my friend. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.